Celebration in the Oaks is the big light show that fills New Orleans' City Park with Christmas wonder every year. And, of course, the neat little train. Great for families with young kids!

If you want a few days a bit further away (without going TOO far away), The Natchitoches Christmas Festival is something to think about. It gets bigger every year until it now draws in tourists from all over the mid-south.

>Before Dewey came up with and standardized his system, library collection organization varied widely from place to place...and even within the SAME place! Under "location," a catalog might say something like "Third Floor, Norton Hall, Shelf Nearest the Stairs, Shelf No. 118A." Some libraries even arranged books by size and color, regardless of content. Not very efficient.

>Dewey was obsessed with efficiency, and came up with a system that allowed library users to find a book within fields and subfields of knowledge relative to one another, rather than in relation to a fixed location or shelf number.

>The "decimal" part of the Dewey Decimal System allows the system to be infinitely expandable...there is always room for something else. For instance, the system was first formally codified in 1876, before, say, airplanes. But now we find airplanes in at 629.13 or thereabouts. 629, when it was thought up, was "Other Engineering," which is exactly what aerodynamics would have been considered in Dewey's day.

Now, none of this might sound like a really big deal, but it revolutionized library organization and made your life (and mine) a lot easier when visiting your local public library.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Today is the 68th anniversary of the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor. That day, 2400 American servicemen died in one of the most infamous sneak attacks in all of military history.

Below are some links with some information about Pearl Harbor and American involvement in the Second World War.